The Caprices - Softcover

Murray, Sabina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080214313X ISBN 13: 9780802143136

Publisher: Grove Press, 2007

Synopsis

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in 2003, The Caprices is a collection of stories artfully told across the theatre of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. An Anglo-Indian cavalryman, his homeland on the brink of revolution, finds himself in Malaysia fighting to protect British interests. Two soldiers lost in the jungle with a Japanese prisoner confront their prejudices toward each other, and the nature of being American. An island witnesses the passing of history from Magellan, to Amelia Earhart, to the dropping of the atomic bomb. With exquisite lyricism tempered by a journalist’s eye for detail, Murray shines light on the tangle of battles created by that conflict, the violent reach across the generations, the shattering reverberations in memory. With this collection, Sabina Murray established herself as a passionate and wise voice of literary fiction.

About this title

Review

"The Caprices" grapples with regrettably marginalized but extraordinarily significant events of World WarII...[Murray} fuse[s] together the ordinary and incomprehensible.

Sania Murray's stories about colonialism and war glitter with juxtapositions.

War is an unusual subject for a young female writer; with each piece, Murray proves to be increasingly exceptional.

Murray has marshalled searing prose to construct tales of faith (more often than not unwarranted), courage and savagery.

The two notions of war as another planet and of cognitive displacement are endered with chance timing and shocking force...

Murray crafts her pieces as series of snapshots...that alternately zoom to details and step back for panoramic historical sweeps.

[Murray] turns the bombed-out and broken setting of World War II into a theater for humankind, where weakness and grace are writ large.

About the Author

Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Phillippines. A former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas and Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, she is the author of the novel Slow Burn. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, New England Review, and other magazines. She has also written a screenplay titled Beautiful Country, commissioned by Terence Malick and starring Nick Nolte. Murray is the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080214313X
• ISBN 13: 9780802143136
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224